WINDOWS: More Free Utilities Redux

This is what the sparse post that went out yesterday afternoon was intended to be. I wanted to gather a bit of information for the next day’s post before I went to see a client. I was short on time and apparently hit “Publish” rather than “Save as Draft”. My apologies.

I am always on the lookout for free software & utilities that actually work and have run across three more for your consideration.

Advanced Uninstaller Pro – Some weeks ago, I posted about software uninstallers that worked better than the one built into the Windows Control Panel and offered two possibilities: (a) Revo Uninstaller (b) Your Uninstaller. There were one or two others that were more “trial-ware” than anything else & Advanced Uninstaller Pro was one of them. Innovative Solutions have decided to make version 10.6 absolutely free. Are all uninstallers the same? Well, some uninstallers are better at finding things than others. I had considered Your Uninstaller to be tops at finding installed applications but I accidentally installed a bit of “crap-ware” the other day & went to use Your Uninstaller to get rid of it. That application could not find it but Revo Uninstaller did. The moral? It always helps to have two uninstallers available even if you only install software on rare occasions because when you really want to rid our PC of something, you need to find it & get rid of it completely!

WinDirStat – Ever wonder which files are consuming the most space on your Hard Drive? Then this may be the answer for you. WinDirStat analyses your HDD and displays the results in a proportional sized, colour coded matrix. You can learn what type of file it is, where it is and how big it is. Perfect for finding that monster logfile that’s squatting in a forgotten folder.

FileType ID – This scenario has probably happened to a lot of us. Some one sends you an email w/ a file attached. Maybe it’s a file type that you recognise. Maybe it’s not. Since you don’t know the true nature of this file & the sender has always sent you good stuff before, you double-click on the file and – surprise, surprise – you wind up introducing your system to viruses, malware and other “cooties”. So how do you know what’s good and what’s not. Antivirus file scanning programmes have been known to miss a lot of things. (They have also been known to quarantine and/or delete perfectly safe files.) FileType Id will give you detailed information on any file before you open it by analysing the file’s binary signature. You can save the results of a file’s analysis as an HTML document And share it with friends, co-workers, etc. to get a second opinion. With around 4700 file-type definitions at the moment, this application is a “must have”.

All three of these freebies were reviewed at The Windows Club so you know that the applications have passed through an initial trial and review.

Finally, always keep an eye on what is going on with the installation process. In other words, read each installer panel carefully. A lot of good software uses installers that want to add a toolbar for a search engine, etc. If you’re not careful, you might wind up with something that you really didn’t want.